Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Midnight In Finland: A high-strangeness diversion, just for fun.

July 29, 1985: Saarijarvi, Central Finland. Two guys were camping at a summer cottage near Lake Kalajarvi. The area was technologically primitive, no regular electricity, and things were done with portable batteries, for example. Forest was everywhere---sounds rather nice to me. One guy was in the cottage, while the other went to their car to move it off the grass at the cottage's front. He noticed a sparkling light on the ground about 50 feet away. It was an about half meter "spot" on the ground. Thinking it must be coming down from some beam, he looked around but located no source. The color was reddish and very dynamic in its sparkling character. Coming closer, he saw that the light seemed to be drifting down onto the spot from above--but it didn't go all the way up, seeming instead to just materialize at about 3 meters and drift down in "tape-like" short banners. There was no sound at all associated with the phenomenon. He tried to feel warmth from the area, but there was none. Adventurous and a bit more confident, he put his hands into the descending light.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"All of a sudden, the light clung to my hands while sparkling, and I became enormously scared. I tried to shake it off and rubbed my hands together, but it just spread around. I couldn't feel it at all, however, it didn't have any weight, it didn't burn, and I couldn't sense any smell. [at least it wasn't like "The Attack Glob From Magonia"; maybe red is friendlier than green despite the fact that this is St. Patrick's Day]. When I couldn't feel the light in any way, I dared to take more of it in my hands, taken from about 20 centimeters off the ground, where the light was more dense. Then I started to run towards the summer cottage with the light sparkling in my hands." ------While he was running, the light did not react to the air as it moved by, merely sitting there unaffected. He explained the situation to his buddy, who was boggled into silence. He spread his fingers and the sticky light stretched between them. [max distance he could spread was 5mm. Outside he felt that the light stayed attached to itself at least up to 3meters]. This light accompanied his fingers sort of like an aura, and did not light up the interior of the cottage [a particularly strange element in this]. After about a half-minute the light began to fade and it ultimately went out. This gave him the added courage to go back out to investigate again.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"I went out to reinvestigate the light phenomenon on the forest road, but it too had disappeared." His friend refused to come out at all. Finally, being alone at midnight became too uncanny and, frightened, he returned to the cottage for a very restless sleep. In the morning, an on-spot investigation showed no remnant effects. One evening later, he returned to the spot with others and nothing happened. UFO Research of Finland did what appears to be a good investigation. There were no traces. Witness testimony reaffirmed that the light did not illuminate anything outside its location [i.e. light in the hands did not illuminate the arms; light in the light column did not illuminate the nearby tree nor bush]. This was "light" which was disobeying fundamental laws, or it was not physically "here" at all, but rather an appearance projected to the senses from elsewhere and never in our three-space... Or...Whatever was going on, this "light" was imageable in the consciousness without passing normally through the environment--or, if it did, it passed as wavelengths which were not reflected or re-emitted, by the environment, but still signaled "red" when hitting the retina. Although this case has no UFO, and there is no good reason to put it into UFO files, it may say something about certain UFO cases. These are the cases [not overwhelmingly common but still a few handfuls] wherein the UFO is described as bright but does not reflect off the water or the ground. Whatever went on at midnight in Central Finland, we owe the Finnish researchers a debt of gratitude for being on the ball and recording this strange [to say the least] occurrence. [from the UFO Research of Finland Annual Report of 1985.]

9 comments:

Well I never. Fascinating. Who are we to anthropomorphise ever single entity that leaks from the sky in a saucer or triangle. Or maybe this was an Earthly anomaly? I do remember urinating into the river off a boat and seeing the water light up phosphorescent green. Apparently there are light-emitting plankton. But this case sounds much different to that.

don't know how to respond to this---I'll just say that most of the readers probably know well that the phosphorescent light-wheels of the Persian Gulf region [and nearby] are caused by light-generating plankton. This is a well studied phenomenon. Also, there seems to be no such known biological phenomenon that suddenly manifests a short distance above the ground, shines red [most phosphorescent organisms, like the light-wheel plankton, phosphoresce light green], and stick to one's hands and to "each other", gradually just "going away". Maybe the poster is trying to tell us/me that. If so, thank you. The statement about anthropomorphizing doesn't seem to relate to the story much if at all, so I can't comment on that. I would guess that the witnesses thought that the phenomenon was something related to Earth, since they had no reason not to. Also, the UFO researchers made no UFO claims [nor did I]. As to the cruder allusion, I'd prefer to keep our discussions on as much of a high road as possible. It is true that urination is a natural act, but since we all can do it, there is little reason to tell everybody about it, if it is irrelevant to the story and mystery at hand. [I played a lot of ball in my time, man, and can be as macho as the next guy, but let's make a deal and leave that part of us in the locker-room; I'd appreciate that. Thank you....and in case anyone doesn't get this, I'm trying to keep this blog as intellectual and cultural as possible, so as not to muddy the waters on our difficult and up-beat quest].

Maybe a folklorist or historian who studies ancient Scandinavian myths or histories could give more information on this. There is a chance an old myth or legend shares similarities with the encounter the man had. It has properties of an hallucination but the other guy saw it too. I don't believe in ectoplasm but this phenomena fits the description of ectoplasm if any of the accounts of that phenomena are true. Why was the man frightened to stay in the woods? Did he ever sense that someone or something was staring at him or threatening him? This account seems more like a haunting or an encounter with magic of some sort than a UFO phenomena.

This account sounds to me a bit akin to angel hair, with a twist. We all know angel hair sightings are almost always a daytime event; who knows if anyone ever had the presence of mind to grab the evanescent stuff and take it to a dark room. Perhaps it would glow a bit! Not red, though.

The idea here is that it is not purely light, not just photons. There must be charged particles or something else present, at least in some temporary state of excitation.

The "solid light" here matches many saucer beam descriptions, complete with glinting particles dancing within the light. I've even heard accounts of "strands" of material swirling within the beam, something else in common here. The red color of the light or beam is unusual, though.

Re your first respondent above, my husband says he should have emulated Condon and used the term, "micturate" instead. Take that for what it's worth!

To Anonymous: this is just a very mysterious thing and right now I'm content to let it sit there boggling me until it gets some "company" of like cases in the anomaly pile. My current tendencies are to see things like this as either paranormal a la folkloric fooling-around [tricksters et al] or as some sort of "intrusion" from "elsewhere" [probably accidentally] manifesting in our local space. Whether that would be purposive-but-semi-incompetent [by the entity behind it], or accidental by the wheels of the Universe, I have no idea, of course. ---------------- To Sue: good to hear from you sweetheart. Tell Rob that he's the only guy I know who can refer to gross bodily activities with class.

I guess this event sounds very mysterious and yes more like an event associated with ebe's.It sort of reminds me of a strange time when I went shooting back in the late eighties in Bannister WA. We were shooting at roos at night with spotlights at a long distance of about 150m once the roos moved off at this one location we spooked something that caused a tornado like dust trail to kick up and move quickly up the hill (I saw this all through my scope on the rifle).

When we went down to the area to have a closer look -one of the guys was a bit freeked out and had a real feeling of danger, I myself felt the hairs raise on my arms and there was nothing to be afraid of! It was a very strange experience suffice to say if the dust trail was of an extraterrestrial nature then this was one of those times when there was no actual physical entity present...

There's no doubt that this was a unique encounter but there are many similar stories and report from fishermen in the arctic. Could it be related to something like that? Probably not. I can't think of a logical explanation for what happened here. * Danika

Reading from this one i cant help feeling maybe this is some kind of bacteria / animal / bugs ? there seem to be no High Strangeness (tm) that usually follow close encounters like this.. other than the light there seem to be nothing special (i might be wrong though)..

syd's comment are more inline with the usual thing happening here.. you dont tramp around in wilderness especially forest and mountains [here in indonesia] without risking some chance encounter with BOL or other shadowy thing (wild beast in Java pretty much non existent), double the risk if the place is considered holy by local people.. the evil stare from invisible thing in wilderness, the hair raise without any visible threat, strange woman / child / baby voice in the wild (?) ? all those are very common occurence here, thus maybe thats why there almost no UFO in here , not many people believe them because they still believe the old myths/folklore..